Freight Trains and Higher Speed Limits

Moderator's Note: this topic is a bit outside of our normal discussion - we'll review it and possibly move it to the Class 1 Freight forum. Excellent topic, just possibly misplaced.

As for the question, check out the Trains magazine article on the Norfolk Southern Crescent Corridor from last month, and the one on the BNSF Z trains a few months prior. My take from those articles is that Class 1s are intensely interested in regaining second-day-delivery shipments, with the blessing and financial help of shippers like UPS, USPS, and FedEx, and from states and the federal government.

Quite true. All those UPS and J. B. Hunt trailers aren't hauling sand.

I just now saw a post under Class I Freight Railroads/CSX Transportation/CSX Intermodal by bratkinson (Nov. 18) which spells out how fast freight is handled and how the railroads are going after it; what CSX is doing is typical of what the Class I's are doing in general.

I woud read the original post as meaning, if a track was upgraded for a higher speed passenger service, would a high speed freight service be viable ?.Which would tie it into this high speed passenger forum.
I wonder if the Chinese are contemplating high speed freight on their hsr ? I would think if it were viable, they would be giving it a try.
SNCF had tgv parcel sets.
I think the day will come when high speed rail freight can compete with road and air. Customers will be prepared to accept longer transit times for a lower price . If it is reliable.
The other factor is the green image. Such concepts as "Food miles" ( green consumers in Europe want to know thier food has not been flown 1/2 way around the world, much to our Farmers chargin), which should benefit rail and sea freight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juice_Train" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railex" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That's not sand. And as Southern Railway pointed out all those container and trailers on trains aren't sand. Most things aren't time sensitive. The juice train makes in it under two days. The Railex train makes in 5. What is there that's more time sensitive than vegetables and juice? But not so time sensitive it doesn't need to go by air?

Adirondacker wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juice_Train

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railex" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That's not sand. And as Southern Railway pointed out all those container and trailers on trains aren't sand. Most things aren't time sensitive. The juice train makes in it under two days. The Railex train makes in 5. What is there that's more time sensitive than vegetables and juice? But not so time sensitive it doesn't need to go by air?

I would think alot of stuff that DOES go by air isnt actually that time sensitive. Just the shipper is locked in to that method.
I used to import solar panels from Australia.Sea freight was cheaper, and would take from 1 week to 4 weeks, depending on sailings, containers been full etc.1 to 2 weeks was ok, but the problem was, the freight forwarder couldnt actually tell me when the shipment would arrive. ( possibly I was too small a customer for them to bother). Air freight was more expensive, but they could tell me when it would arrive, and it would be 2 to 4 days. so more times than not I would air freight, partly because it was faster, but mainly because it was more reliable.
I suspect it is similiar with the likes of the juice train. Its probably quicker than ordinary freight, but i suspect the main advantage is knowing when the consignment is going to turn up .
Ah yes , the thing about the air freight was, I would go to the depot to pick my panels up, and i was amazed at the items that had been air freighted. rolls of carpet , drums of liquids etc, and the fact they didnt seem to be going anywhere in a hurry. I commented on this to the wharehouse person, and he said he couldn't understand it either , people would air freight it in and leave it sitting in the warehouse for weeks or months. He said something to the effect they made more out of storage fees than the actual Air freight charges.

David Benton wrote:I woud read the original post as meaning, if a track was upgraded for a higher speed passenger service, would a high speed freight service be viable ?.Which would tie it into this high speed passenger forum.
I wonder if the Chinese are contemplating high speed freight on their hsr ? I would think if it were viable, they would be giving it a try.
SNCF had tgv parcel sets.
I think the day will come when high speed rail freight can compete with road and air. Customers will be prepared to accept longer transit times for a lower price . If it is reliable.
The other factor is the green image. Such concepts as "Food miles" ( green consumers in Europe want to know thier food has not been flown 1/2 way around the world, much to our Farmers chargin), which should benefit rail and sea freight.

I believe that when the French first designed their LGV network the intent was to operate freight trains during overnight hours but they discovered they needed all that time during the night for maintenance. Heavier axle loadings for freight might also have an effect on maintenance needs.
As to your later post about shipments not being picked up, it drove the railroads crazy in the 1970's that shippers who used mini-landbridge from the Far East to the East Coast, which saved at least a week compared to all-water, would let containers sit after arrival, often for as much as a week, before picking them up. Admittedly they weren't paying a premium for the faster service, but if a shipment of 10 containers arrived and they needed two right away, they'd pick up two and let the others sit until they wanted them. This represented quite a change from domestic piggyback shippers, who routinely showed up within hours to pick up their trailers. It was rather rare for a loaded trailer to spend the night in a piggyback terminal.

Adirondacker wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juice_Train

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railex" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That's not sand. And as Southern Railway pointed out all those container and trailers on trains aren't sand. Most things aren't time sensitive. The juice train makes in it under two days. The Railex train makes in 5. What is there that's more time sensitive than vegetables and juice? But not so time sensitive it doesn't need to go by air?

how about getting the rails back to mail & express? Have some routes (Chicago-St Louis) competitive for mail, small packages, competing with trucks for short hauls? Not all mail goes by air. Use UPS/FedEx?USPS to replace REA as the local service provider?

Excon90's point about containers not being picked up on arrival goes back to the justification for demurrage charges. Customers were using freight cars as warehouses. You can pay a lot of demurrage for the cost of building a warehouse. Also, the freight is already loaded if the shipper needs to send it elsewhere.

Gwoodle's point reminds me of the situation pre-AMTRAK. The Government pays a charge to railroads to handle mail, which was in turn used to subsidize passenger service on the same routes (or even the same trains).

I remember when AMTRAK promoted package express service, then decided they didn't really want to handle that business. Maybe we need a rebirth of REA?

Les

I wish you guys could've seen the freights that came south thru Savannah headed to Jacksonville,on the Seaboard side, back in the late 70s to the mid 80s that were authorized to run at passenger train
speed. Those things were scary. You'd see those bad boys coming and you'd try to get as far back from the ballast line as possible. They'd suck the teeth out of your head.

Please read Title 49 of the United States Code of Federal Regulations, which does allow freight trains at speeds higher than 60 M.P.H., and states the rules for doing it legally.
There's a joke that when a railroad increases the travel time of freight cars, it's always in units of 24 hours. The reason is that no matter how fast a train travels, it still has to stop at classification yards to be switched into other trains or finally placed at the destination's siding. Those freight trains often run only once a day, so arriving a few minutes earlier, or getting switched a few minutes faster doesn't help unless it means making a connection with a train that leaves 24 hours earlier than before. Often, there is no intermediate departure.
A very few railroads have gone back into door to door pick up and delivery. Tyburn Railroad (TYBR) is one small example. Some of the piggyback services use subcontractors or partners to do the same thing.
There is still a problem of getting customers to pay for faster rail service. Many will pay high prices for air freight or express, even if they don't need the speed, but think that the same price for rail freight at the same speed is too expensive, it doesn't have the same snob appeal.

ExCon90 wrote:

David Benton wrote:I woud read the original post as meaning, if a track was upgraded for a higher speed passenger service, would a high speed freight service be viable ?.Which would tie it into this high speed passenger forum.
I wonder if the Chinese are contemplating high speed freight on their hsr ? I would think if it were viable, they would be giving it a try.
SNCF had tgv parcel sets.
I think the day will come when high speed rail freight can compete with road and air. Customers will be prepared to accept longer transit times for a lower price . If it is reliable.
The other factor is the green image. Such concepts as "Food miles" ( green consumers in Europe want to know thier food has not been flown 1/2 way around the world, much to our Farmers chargin), which should benefit rail and sea freight.

I believe that when the French first designed their LGV network the intent was to operate freight trains during overnight hours but they discovered they needed all that time during the night for maintenance. Heavier axle loadings for freight might also have an effect on maintenance needs.
As to your later post about shipments not being picked up, it drove the railroads crazy in the 1970's that shippers who used mini-landbridge from the Far East to the East Coast, which saved at least a week compared to all-water, would let containers sit after arrival, often for as much as a week, before picking them up. Admittedly they weren't paying a premium for the faster service, but if a shipment of 10 containers arrived and they needed two right away, they'd pick up two and let the others sit until they wanted them. This represented quite a change from domestic piggyback shippers, who routinely showed up within hours to pick up their trailers. It was rather rare for a loaded trailer to spend the night in a piggyback terminal.

I'm not certain about the TGV but when the first Japanese Shinkansen line was proposed it was supposed to have containerized freight service operating during the overnight hours. These COFC trains would have been high speed but much less so than the passenger bullet trains. I dont recall reading of any loading gauge issues but in the end the nightly maintenance window required to keep the system running at full speed precluded freight service.

electricron wrote:

SouthernRailway wrote:True...but now they're making big bucks by transporting highway semi-trailers on their trains.
Do freight railroads have zero interest in recapturing the lost business of time-sensitive freight?

Those semi-trailers on trains aren't carrying time sensitive freight.
To actually be serious about recapturing time-sensitive freight, the freight railroad companies would have to reintroduce station managers and clerks in every town they wish to serve. That would require a facility (depot) where customers could drop off and pick up their time sensitive freight. I don't think the railroads would ever want to provide door to door delivery and pickup. To be effective, every railroad would have to participate to provide a national wide reach. I don't think we'll ever see that reimplemented.

UPS is a major intermodal shipper using Class 1's intermodal services. UPS says Jump and the railroads respond HOW HIGH! Where appropriate, UPS Ground moves by rail. UPS in many cases has located their local facilities near railroad intermodal facilities to minimize drayage time and costs. UPS measures railroad service by 'sort failures' Shipments originating at a UPS terminal have a defined 'Sort Time' at their destination terminal - if the UPS trailer or container doesn't arrive at the destination UPS terminal - SORT FAILURE. Can't speak for other carriers, mine jumps through all kinds of hoops to prevent getting a Sort Failure.

UPS pays for premium service and they demand that they get it.

mmi16 has it right, UPS, Less-than-Truckload carriers(LTL), and Reefer truckload carriers are willing to pay a premium for faster service. Everyone else prefers a somewhat slower, but less expensive service, and I am only talking about Intermodal customers here. Also for heavy bulk trains like coal, grain, crude oil, and Ethanol, operation at speeds greater than 45 loaded or 50 mph empty significantly increases the distance needed to stop.

In the case of UPS there service is built around Sort Time, typically the Inbound Sort starts at 6 am. The Outbound Sort starts at 6 pm and finishes a bit after 7 pm. So the railroad needs to arrive at their Intermodal terminal, have all the UPS trailers unloaded and Drayed to the UPS terminal's dock by 6 am. If they miss the loaded trailer will sit fully loaded until the next morning's sort. In other words being 1/2 hour late is no worse than being 23 1/2 hours late, either way you add a day to the delivery time. That is why cutting anything less than a full day off delivery times for UPS is worthless.

Taking a 4 unit Premium Intermodal from Los Angeles to Chicago over BNSF takes about 52 hours after allowing for 2 time zone changes, lets figure 50 hours at Throttle 8 with 200 gallons per locomotive per hour, that works out to 40,000 gallons consumed. If we figure the railroad buys its diesel fuel for $2.80 per gallon we can figure that it cost $112,000 for the fuel needed for the trip. Figuring the train has space for 150 53' trailers (requires a train length of about 8500') the fuel portion of the cost per trailer will be $747.00. What I am trying to say is that speed isn't cheap. The same 4 locomotives could probably get 250 doublestacked containers over the same distance in 72 hours and use 20% less fuel doing it.

Out of necessity, this will be a long post, backed by the experience of nearly fifty years watching and researching -- mostly the former PRR Middle Division, but with some other examples thrown in. If any other members could add amplifications of corrections, it would be very much welcomed and appreciated.

The Pennsylvania began listing "Arranged Freight Train Service" a long time ago. Old issues of Railway Age referred to freight moves by symbol as early as the first World War; and the earliest Employee Timetables I've seen listed most Enola-Altoona-Pittsburgh moves as M- (for Middle) 1, 2, 5, 6, etc. Not too many were listed , but I suspect operating "in sections" was more common, since traffic as a whole was more volatile. More, and faster services for markets like New York-Pitsburgh and New York-Buffalo began to appear as competition from trucking materialized after 1930.

But things really began to get complicated after World War II; the work "The Pennsy in Chicago" by the late Ed DeRouyn listed about twenty daily eastbound symbol freights originating in the Windy City around 1950. The Pennsy had at least four major yards (Harsimus Cove, Meadows, Greenville and Waverly) in northen New Jersey alone, and excess freight could be swapped between some of the schedules without the addition of a "B" or second section in a lot of cases, Still, the limitation of an M-1 Mountain type to about 75 cars meant that a lot of additional moves would be necessary from time to time, particularly when a large produce block came from the Santa Fe, Burlington. or one of the UP's granger partners,

It's also worth noting that eastbound PRR freight traffic moved mostly via Logansport, Ind. and the "PanHandle" route rather than the old "Eastern" (Ohio) Division via Crestline, which had a couple of stiff grades. Some PRR ETT's from the Fifites and Sixties showed an option of using either route for a handful of moves, and the high-priority livestock-handling FW- (for "Feed and Water")-8 opted for the passenger-heavy route via Fort Wayne, Lima and Crestline. (In a last-ditch attempt to retain livestock traffic, this service was re-symbolled NF- (for "No Feed")-4 or -6, but to no avail).

Traffic from southwestern connections at St. Louis moved on a series of freights symbolled SW-, with only one (SW-6) venturing as far east as Enola; presumably, much of the traffic could be folded into the much larger volume from Chicago somewere along the line. Lots of westbound empties were generated in the process, and these moved mostly on a series designated LCL- (later changed to PR-), and presumably headed for the Pennsy's "new" breakbulk on the north side of downtown Pittsburgh, but in reality, underutilized practically from the date of its completion. When traffic got very heavy, as in the days of the Vietnam-related 1964-66 defense build-up, "B" sections could show up on several moves, and solid extras of empties sometimes went west. And by some strange reasoning, Middle Divy maids-of-all-work M-9/10 were revived for about a year, and I saw as many as five sections on the block operator's train sheets on a few occasions.

Things began to fall apart rapidly after the Penn Central bankruptcy and the completion of toll-free Interstate 80 between Youngstown and Stroudsburg in the summer of 1970, almost all the dressed meat traffic from the Plains states disappeared within a few months, for example. An attempt to recapture wetern perishable traffic via a service symbolled AST- ("Astronaut") didn't get too far, either. The near-complete demise of passenger service finally got the PC brass thinking about cutting the Middle Divy down from three tracks (one usually signalled in both directions) to two, but this process was not started until around 1981, and completed two years later.

Rerturning to the present day, I can see from the windows of my "Tuesday-Saturday" address here in Topton along the former Reading, that a lot of high-priority traffic has found its way back onto the rails, some of it with forwarders like Clipper or perishable-oriented truckers like Stevens, and Interstate 80 doesn't seem as crowded with either perishable or "dry freight" rigs as it did in the Seventies when I dispatched for a couple of regulated truckers, Traffic coming up from the South, Southwest, and presumably, Mexico on i-81, seems to have increased, however.

PRR never operated multiple sections on its famous TrucTrains; the sales department seemed interested only in a predictable quantity of stable business. But the ETT's did list a couple of moves carrying much higher suffix numbers and operating only on weekends or "as required"; moves designated "TT-SPL" also showed up from time to time. That practice also seems to have carried over to the present, as I will occasionally catch short, unanticipated intermodal moves eastbound from Enola on the weekends.

And as we've touched on in other posts, the railroads don't seem to have much interest in improving the fluidity of their two-way-signalled double track lines via adding a third track or sidings for overtaking moves; UP's three-track stretch between Gibbon and North Platte, Neb, is about the only place where there would be room to experiment, and NYC's attempt to mix freight and the remains of the Great Steel Fleet via the use of strategically-placed "long sidings" gradually fell apart in the Sixties. And of course, everybody's "waiting for the shoe to drop" regarding PANAMAX.

And in a final observation from a varied and checkered career, I was fortunate to have spent a few months back around the "turn of the millenium" (??) holding down a daily assignment as a courier that gave me a regular opportunity to check out UP's main line between Omaha, Blair and Fremont, Neb. The prectice seemed to be to keep the time-sensitive intermodals (UP handled very few, if any solid trains of automotive or similar commtment-based freight) moving on strict schedules, while the general-service freights often spent a lot of time in sidings waiting to recrew -- especially on holiday weekends.

So while the industry has been restored to health at a pattern similar to public utilities, It seems clear that daily operations aren't quite as interesting to watch, not do they offer as much variety as when this writer was starting out -- too many years ago.